Photo processing

Filmulator

There's never been a better time to be an avid photographer with an interest in Linux and open source. As is often said in these pages, applications like darktable and RawTherapee can compete with some of the best commercial software on any platform, even allowing professional photographers a workflow that takes them directly from raw photography to final output from their Linux desktop. Filmulator is another application that adds to this toolkit, because, despite its alpha status, it's already capable of exceptional results.

Initially, the name Filmulator might imply a processing effect that could make photos look like film, maybe by adding grain, color distortion, and noise, for instance. Instead, it lets you process RAW images as you might film photographs in a developing lab. Its power comes from tone mapping, a subject mentioned two months ago when I looked at Luminance HDR. Tone mapping is commonly used for those high-dynamic-range photos provided by estate agents and the cool kids of Instagram. It remaps the color and intensity of the pixels in both the shadow and highlight regions of a photo to improve the contrast, without affecting the global contrast level, seemingly adding more detail to an image. This is much how our eyes and brain work when perceiving detail and contrast in a dark area that can't otherwise be represented in a static image. Filmulator attempts to add these details by simulating the nonlinear nature of film development, only with a much more restricted set of parameters. But first you need to get the application installed.

Hopefully, by the time you read this, packages will be available for your distribution. If not, you'll need to resort to source code and build it using the Qt Creator project file, rather than through a standard Make system. This is something to consider if you're desperate to try Filmulator for yourself. The only other caveat is that processing is slow and uses plenty of RAM, but that's the nature of RAW processing, especially in the early stages of application development. This will surely improve as the application matures.

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